I am currently reading Hondo Solomon's The Polygamist Papers. While he is likely a religious person following the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, his perspective in this book is decidedly academic. A good way to understand that is another title he has, Polygamy as Economic Warfare.
As I read this morning, he made the case from multiple cultures that 'monogamy only' destabilizes families precisely because of the ever present unequal ratio between male and female, and he also alluded to the elites throughout history and across multiple cultures practicing forms of polygamy for familial power and wealth consolidation, even while the same families enforced monogamy only on their subjects.
Then it dawned on me: God didn't just 'allow' polygyny, but approved through regulation because its presence in Israel prevented business and economic consolidation into the hands of the few! Rather, the patriarchs in each family could build and strengthen the family as a building block of society. Certainly, rulership was in the hands of Divinely appointed men, be they kings or judges, but wealth and power were to be diluted through the tribes and family heads to prevent consolidation into an elite.
That is part of how Israel was to not have any poor and was to be a nation, in the physical, of priests and kings!
#brainexplodes #powertothepeople #buildahouse
As I read this morning, he made the case from multiple cultures that 'monogamy only' destabilizes families precisely because of the ever present unequal ratio between male and female, and he also alluded to the elites throughout history and across multiple cultures practicing forms of polygamy for familial power and wealth consolidation, even while the same families enforced monogamy only on their subjects.
Then it dawned on me: God didn't just 'allow' polygyny, but approved through regulation because its presence in Israel prevented business and economic consolidation into the hands of the few! Rather, the patriarchs in each family could build and strengthen the family as a building block of society. Certainly, rulership was in the hands of Divinely appointed men, be they kings or judges, but wealth and power were to be diluted through the tribes and family heads to prevent consolidation into an elite.
That is part of how Israel was to not have any poor and was to be a nation, in the physical, of priests and kings!
#brainexplodes #powertothepeople #buildahouse